Pollution Halves Visitors to Beijing

Beijing residents aren’t the only ones turned off by how smoggy their skies get. According to a state media report, the city’s notorious pollution is also deterring tourists.

Visitors to China’s capital declined by roughly 50% in the first three quarters of the year compared to a year earlier, according to a report in Beijing Youth Daily based on a survey of domestic travel agents (in Chinese).

The decline was steeper than in the first half of the year, when tourists to the city fell by only 14.3% year-on-year to 2.14 million, the report said, citing the Beijing Municipal Commission of Tourism Development.

Associated Press

A foreign tourist wearing a mask walks in front of Tiananmen Gate on a polluted day in Beijing.

“We had a total of 20,000 inbound tourists last year, but only 10,000 in the first three quarters of this year,” the report quoted Guo Lingmei, head of marketing at travel agency BTG International Travel and Tours, as saying. “There are still two months left in the year, but because the majority of overseas tourists book their flights and hotels in advance… this year looks to be dismal,” he added.

If the current trend holds, Beijing will see its first decline in inbound tourism since 2008, when much of the world was mired in financial crisis.

One of the main factors in the decline, according to the paper: extreme air pollution in the first half of the year “hyped by foreign media.”

The Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and other historic sites in and around Beijing still draw mobs of domestic and foreign visitors, but they are often wrapped in smog. Meanwhile, criticism of the capital’s suffocating air and congested traffic continues to spread. Though Beijing Youth Daily blames foreign news organizations for being overly critical, the newspaper’s sister state-run media outlets have been equally vocal.

The municipal government of Beijing adopted an emergency-response plan for air pollution in early October, including alternate driving days for cars with even- and odd-numbered license plates on days of “serious” air pollution, but analysts say the levels of pollution required to trigger the ban are so high that the new policy might only come into play a few times a year.

Poor air quality isn’t the only reason for a decline in visitors to Beijing. The yuan, having appreciated more than 2% against the U.S. dollar this year, is making traveling to China more expensive. Some foreigners are also coming from countries where their own economies haven’t fully recovered from the European debt crisis.

Similar factors are putting a damper on tourism in the rest of China. The first half of the year saw the number of inbound tourists to China fall by 4.2%, the report said, citing the Beijing Municipal Commission of Tourism Development. Overseas tourists (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) declined by 7.1%. The number of visitors to China from Japan and Korea fell especially hard. Escalating tensions between Japan and China, including a territorial dispute in East China Sea, helped push down the number of Japanese tourists by 54.5% in the first half.

Still, the growing incomes of Chinese citizens and their increasingly sophisticated ways of spending money for leisure is more than holding up the country’s tourism industry. Revenue from the industry grew 10.7% to 1.4 trillion yuan ($228 billion) in the first half of the year, according to the National Tourism Administration.

In fact, the total number of people arriving at major tourist sites in China over the first two days of the “National Day” holiday was up 18.8% this year, compared to last year, according to an economist with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. It was a slowdown from the 21% rise during the holiday week last year, but comparable to a 8.8% rise in 2011 and 6.5% rise in 2010.